Lionel Richie parties 'All Night Long' in O.C.

Lionel Richie certainly knows how to work a crowd. The 64-year-old entertainer strutted across the stage Tuesday night at Honda Center in Anaheim with confidence and flair, sharing his wealth of pop, R&B and funk hits spanning over four decades.

Entering to the sound of DJ remix of “Hello,” Richie was all smiles from the start, launching immediately into “All Aound the World.” He was playful and personable with his in-between banter, graciously thanking the audience for packing the O.C. arena less than a year after filling the Hollywood Bowl on a previous leg of his All the Hits All Night Long tour.

“We’ve known each other a very long time,” he said with a laugh. “When I was in love, you were in love. When I was out of love, you were out of love. When I was young, you were young. When you got old … I was young! Nothing has changed.”

While ballads like “My Love,” “Ballerina Girl” and his first solo chart-topping single, “Truly,” were tender highlights, delivered pretty much flawlessly, it was his upbeat and funkier Commodores tracks that got the house rockin’. “Fancy Dancer,” “Lady (You Bring Me Up)” and “Brick House,” the latter peppered by a bit of “Fire” by Ohio Players, went over huge, bringing the mostly older crowd to their feet.

After another exuberant tune, “Dancing on the Ceiling,” Richie called out a few wild movers and shakers in the front row for their lack of skills. “I haven’t seen dancing like that since 1984,” he joked, “and I have no idea what that brother was doing over there.”

Mid-set, Richie offered a trio of love songs, blended together seamlessly, that he remarked have always been there for fans – whether they were devastatingly heartbroken (“Still”) or thought things couldn’t get any worse until they saw their former lover with someone else (“Oh No”), or were finally over it and so enthralled with someone new that they wanted to shout it from the rooftops (“Stuck on You”).

“You go home, you put on your album, your CD, your 8-track, your cassette and you call on Lionel Richie,” he said between anecdotes about each classic.

Though he proclaimed this party would go on “all night long,” it was a week night and much of this crowd was older –so “all night” actually ended at about 10:45 p.m. After getting the audience riled up one more time, dancing along to that 1983 hit, he returned to encore with “We Are the World.” The song, he says, has the most meaning to him, since it was written with his friend, Michael Jackson. As the words scrolled across giant screens, it seemed like everyone was roaring along.

CeeLo Green, the crossover hip-hop star and former judge on “The Voice,” opened the show ahead of the printed ticket time of 7:30. As people filed into the venue, the former Goodie Mob star was already in full swing, looking fancy in his all-red outfit, which matched his entire band, including two lovely ladies up front who danced, sang and played bass and guitar. His set was a mix of his own familiar radio hits and medleys of covers, including the Pussycat Dolls’ “Don’t Cha,” “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” and the James Brown staple “I Feel Good.”

Like the headliner, Green also was very good at engaging the audience. “Some of you might recognize me from television, some of you might recognize me from a fantasy,” he mentioned. He confused them further, however, by noting that sometimes people know him as Gnarls Barkley, his collaboration with producer Danger Mouse, before he delivered a scaled-down version of that duo’s smash, “Crazy.” To close, he did the clean version of the song “Forget You” – “This is the song made me rich and famous,” he said.